Effective regeneration of anode material recycled from scrapped Li-ion batteries

Abstract Recycling high-valuable metal elements (such as Li, Ni, Co, Al and Cu elements) from scrapped lithium ion batteries can bring significant economic benefits. However, recycling and reusing anode material has not yet attracted wide attention up to now, due to the lower added-value than the above valuable metal materials and the difficulties in regenerating process. In this paper, a novel regeneration process with significant green advance is proposed to regenerate anode material recycled from scrapped Li-ion batteries for the first time. After regenerated, most acetylene black (AB) and all the styrene butadiene rubber (SBR), carboxymethylcellulose sodium (CMC) in recycled anode material are removed, and the surface of anode material is coated with pyrolytic carbon from phenolic resin again. Finally, the regenerated anode material (graphite with coating layer, residual AB and a little CMC pyrolysis product) is obtained. As expected, all the technical indexs of regenerated anode material exceed that of a midrange graphite with the same type, and partial technical indexs are even closed to that of the unused graphite. The results indicate the effective regeneration of anode material recycled from scrapped Li-ion batteries is really achieved.